**VRay CRASHES and HyperThreading???**

[reza]

for those of you with troubled using HT...try updating your motherboard's bios and updating your windows operating system. if it works on most computers or users...then i suggest people post their setup's...especially the motherboard brand and model..and check whether overclocking is effecting it....

[RErender]

The Supermicro X5DAL-G's work great.

[Syclone1]

The Supermicro X5DAL-G's work great.

I second that, those are the boards Im running here and have had no hardware related issues.

-dave

[RErender]

To address strawitz's questions more directly, I do not think there is a flaw in V-Ray compared to that "other" renderer. I do think that V-Ray is more aggresive in it's use of resources, much like pumping up a engine to produce more horsepower the strength or weakness of the supporting parts is going to show. As far as considering "hotwiring" windows with the 3GB switch as a hack, It is silly not to set up windows to use all the ram in a system, there are people out there with 3GB of memory who can never access more than 1.8 Gigs ...

[strawitz]

Could it possibly be the motherboard that is messing things up. maybe different motherboards perform better or worst with HT technology

Hey guys thanks for all the replies and varying opinions...I am neither a HT hater or avid supporter...What I do support is being able to use all the advantages that a certain OS/Application will give me, and with XP HyperThreading was touted as such. So to get back to matter at hand and give you a further update concerning my latest round of tests...

First, I ran two more tests at home over the weekend with HT disabled doing system restarts between renders to make sure I wasn't just "getting lucky" concerning the stability...and both times I was able to get the animation completed...HOOORAYY!!!

Second, I restarted my system here at work with HT Enabled and restared the same animation...same file...and it crashed about 50 frames into the animation...same error....So this to me seems a bit peculiar needless to say...

So I guess all I can conclude (for me at least) is that I have a problem with VRay and HT and my immediate solution is to disable this to bring any kind of stability to this configuration...Oh well...As soon as I get the chance I'm going to disable HT on my system at work to see if I get the the same results...

BTW: In case there is someone who is logging these problems...The motherboard I'm using at home is a SuperMicro X5DAE with Dual 2.4 GHZ Xenon's...At work, I'm not sure the motherboard since they are HP XW 8000 workstations running Dual 3.0 GHZ Xenon's.

Thanks for all the advice and help,

Kyle

[Smalerbi]

At the moment, my problem would seem to be an isolated one. The crashing is taking place on my work station, this is my W2K sever machine. This is the system I have my licenses copy of Vray. I rendered a 3000 frame animation over the network using backburner. I had 4 systems cranking right along with no problems except the server. Max would crash from time to time but the nice thing about backburner is, the system would stay idle for about 7 min. and than it would be re-assigned back into the network. I think I need to do a fresh OS install on my server because this thing has been patched together so many times. The other machines works just fine but thank you everyone for the helpful comments.

Scott.

[casewolf]

I can only repeat myself and second strawitz about the HT problems. I experienced EXACTLY the same behaviour in animations with my Dell Dual Xeon 2.8 HT Workstation. Since I disabled HT in BIOS I never ever had any more freezes in overnight animations. Before - I could be sure not to be able to finish about 50-100 Frames in a row.

This appeared with completely different scene setups from lowpoly 500.000 to highpoly (around 3Mio and greater).

It seems to me, that this problem exists but its sort of seldom and rather random in its appearance. This will make debugging not an easy task unless vlado can reproduce the 'right' configuration that freezes/crashes.

After having disabled HT for about 2-3 months now everything works fine here and I never got problems again with my animations.

[RErender]

hmmm, interesting that you guys refuse to consider that it is your hardware...

[Jukkat]

I tryed the 3Gig switch, and cant get it to work

If it is a hardware problem, where should i look first.......

[casewolf]

hmmm, interesting that you guys refuse to consider that it is your hardware...

Look - I don't have any problems with any other software on my workstation - except animations in vray (I use stuff from Autocad to Rhino, over Premiere to Photoshop, Quark Xpress to Illustrator - yes all legal)..... do you think this could be able flawlessly with concerns about my hardware ?!?!

I don't want to sound rude, but this should be really understood - it's a hidden and small nasty bug. It doesn't bother me too much though, cause I think I have no major disadvantages at the moment without HT on a dual CPU system.

[strawitz]

Hey...

I sort of agree with casewolf which I'm sure the rest of those without problems are "rolling their eyes"...bottom line is I really want to make this software work (why else would I be spending time on this) on the workstations we have, but based upon my findings I can't seem to obtain any stability on a variety of different hardware configurations with HT enabled...so I guess I'll have to live with that contraint for now.

I do realize thta this could be an extremely difficult bug to track down since it seems to be very random in its appearance that's why I thought we could start with CPU's and MotherBoards to help gather data concerning the crashes.

Rerender, it's not that I refuse to believe that it could be my hardware BUT as you probably know if you are using say 5 other high end applications for months (even rendered the same scene using another render in MAX) without a crash and then you decide to add something "new" to the mix and then start having crashes then wouldn't you think that perhaps just perhaps you've stumbbled upon something that "could" be a bug??? Oh and yes in the end it really IS my hardware because there is obviously something about this and other configurations that VRay doesn't like...so I guess you're right.

My reason for posting these questions was to gain some insight into my problem and to discover if there were others having the same issue and how they were dealing with its solution.


Thanks again for all the help...

Kyle

[RErender]

I understand how the evidence you have gathered makes it look like V-Ray is where the bug lies, but from my perspective it looks like the hardware.

1. My experience is with v-ray and 20+ dual xeon 2.8's with HT enabled running on the supermicro x5dal-g. We have rendered 1000's of frames and not encountered this type of error.

2. Many others with the x5dal-g have reported no errors.

3. I have not heard of any p4's with HT encountering this issue.

4. Some have reported that after updating the MB drivers and bios that the problem went away.

To me this evidence points to the 7505 chipset and/or bios/drivers in some implementations. It reminds me of the AMD 760 chipset and it's issues with AGP, then everyone was blaming ATI and NVidia but in reality it was the chipset.

[reza]

its true what rerender said....i have dual xeon 3.06 with 1mb cache and have rendered 3500 frame using vray....and my HT was doing fine...
if majourity says its working...than i guess the answer is already in our face....the ram, motherboard or the whole instalation...why dont u do this..since its such an issue...format the hdd, update the bios, then reinstall xp with service pack 1...then install max...get the updated servicepack for max then render something...we all know its not vray or max or intel...so its down to your ram and motherboard. mixing diffrent ram brands or size or even speed results to error..

[net_ralf]

Now let me say a few words.

Well i read all the post which seems to take a while. I do agree with the HT thing and not the the faulty hardware issue. Here is what tried. I am having a high poly file in max 5.1 and vray. About 2 Mio polys and its animated. I had following machines to render it and only one is actually able to run it.

HP xw8000 3ghz DUal Xeon,2.5GB Ram with ht enabled = crashed
Intel p4 2.6 800FSB 2GB Ram with ht enabled = crashed
AMD Dual 1600+ 1 GB Ram no HT as u know = runs smoothly

Well now we are back to this funny ht idea. I would turn it off when u use animations and another thing i found out. If you want to render out an animation start backburner and submit the render job through netrender. WHich means u start the server and manager on the same machine. Run the manager fisrs, submit the job, close max and then start the server. Seems to run just fine, and no crashes. Just another hint of working around crashes before you think of using a hammer

Let me know if you guys tested it

[Syclone1]

Well all I can say is on my current Dual Xeon 2.8ghz on a X5DAL-G I have rendered 22,277 frames over the last few months and no HT related issues

-dave